Thursday, May 15, 2008

Video.Show - Creating your own YouTube-style site

Video.Show is a reference-quality blueprint for implementing a user-generated video content site. It provides everything you need to create a website for uploading, encoding, cataloguing, publishing and commenting on videos, using Silverlight, Expression Encoder and Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live.

Setting up your own video community website can be a real headache. There's a lot to worry about: disk space, bandwidth, video formats and encoding...

Video.Show does all of the hard work for you. The key is Silverlight technology paired up with Silverlight Streaming's free, world class content hosting. Video.Show provides Silverlight video controls, Silverlight Streaming hosting integration, leveraging Expression Encoder's ability to handle most popular video formats so you can be uploading videos within minutes.

Few months back Tim Sneath had announced about the final version of Video.Show, a ready-to-run solution for hosting video content on the web! Following is the part of the announcement he made:

You might be interested in Video.Show if:

Your company or school wants to distribute e-learning or educational content over the web for internal or external access;

You're creating the next YouTube-style site and you want somewhere to start;

You want to share home movies with your family and friends via your own personal site, rather than uploading them to somewhere public like YouTube or MSN Soapbox;

You're running a conference or event and you want to make the materials available for anyone else to watch;

You're a hosting provider and you want to offer your customers a way to store and share videos;

You simply want to learn how to build a great AJAX web site experience with Microsoft technologies.

Getting started with Video.Show is easy: all you need is a machine with Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2005 Express and Expression Encoder; the software is built to guide you through a few simple configuration steps (setting an admin password and obtaining a Silverlight Streaming key), and then you're up and running

He also gives one of his favorite real-world practical implementations of Video.Show example as filmsforlearning.org, a UK-based education site for students and teachers.Since the release of Video.Show there have been many thousands of downloads.

Also check this link for demonstrating the experience for a user without Silverlight installed.

Video.Show is a Microsoft Software-plus-Services Blueprint. Software-plus-Services Blueprints are a series of open source frameworks and workflow-based guidance packages designed to provide an architectural bridge and reduce the friction you experience building real-world Software-plus-Services applications. The source code can be downloaded from codeplex.